Whole Child Development
Well here it is! There were so many great questions and so little time! I’ve supplemented with some links below. Please add your links and input in the comment section as well!
It seems the older I get, the more I realize the importance of moderation. Over and over again, I find that answers lie in between dogmatic extremes. Perhaps nowhere is this realization more important than when considering approaches to early literacy.
On the first of this month, I wrote a post about The Gesell Institute of Human Development and their recent study, asserting that the progression of healthy child development has not changed over the past 70 years, in spite of the fact that our expectations of them have. (You can read the full post here.)
It’s occurred to me that I’ve used the term DAP a lot around here lately, and that it’s a term that warrants a full discussion in itself. This is a term you can take an entire series of courses on, but here’s my best attempt to get you the basics — quick and dirty! I’m hoping this will serve as a reference point for more discussions!
In recent years, Finland has been consistently at the top of worldwide rankings by nation for 15 year-old academic performance. They’re obviously doing something right. And in my biased informed opinion, if we want to know why their 15 year-olds are so bright, we need to look not only at what they’re doing in high school, but also (and perhaps more so) at what they’re doing in their early education programs.
In recent years, Finland has been consistently at the top of worldwide rankings by nation for 15 year-old academic performance. They’re obviously doing something right. And in my biased informed opinion, if we want to know why their 15 year-olds are so bright, we need to look not only at what they’re doing in high school, but also (and perhaps more so) at what they’re doing in their early education programs.
I’ve been back in the public schools lately, as my oldest son is now a kindergartener. It struck me right away that what I was doing with first graders just seven years ago is now considered kindergarten territory. As was mentioned in the article I linked to previously by Alicia Bayer, “In America, we currently have this idea that our children are struggling academically so the answer lies in pushing them more and more, at earlier and earlier ages… If our children are struggling academically, it does not make sense to make them do more of the same things that are failing them and from a younger age.”
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